No Boundaries

Well, what a week or so it has been. Sundance is officially over, but it isn’t over for me. I still have two more movies to see this evening and a few more posts to write. Writing so much about movies is fun, but it gets a bit difficult to fit into the spare moments of every day. That is, if you try to do it well. It is good to get it all out of one’s system while it’s fresh.

In the middle of my Sundance forays a couple of things, worthy of thought, came up and took me off track for a while. I’ll just touch on one of them now.

While doing my teeny chore of web-based research on the film Freedom Riders (an excellent documentary about groups of white and black students, primarily, who rode buses into the deep south in 1961 as a way of forcing desegregation of interstate commerce), I found myself sidetracked, at considerable length. The film got me thinking, for the first time, about how pro-integration whites were treated in the South. This has some import for me because I was, for my first six years which were spent in Arkansas, a pro-integration white boy in the South or, at least, the swaddled bundle that my pro-integration parents lugged around.

My father was a reporter for the anti-segregation Arkansas Gazette, then an editorial writer with the, also anti-segregation, Pine Bluff Commercial, then a Nieman fellow at Harvard for a year, then an editorial writer at the Arkansas Gazette. My mother was a part-time writer for smaller, largely union-owned, papers. She had the master’s in journalism from Columbia. He was, more or less, the Brad Pitt character in A River Runs Through It (without the Brad Pitt looks). It was the late fifties and early sixties and we all know about how that was for professional women in the “masculine” careers because we’ve seen the Madmen.

He was born on a proverbial dirt-scrabble farm in the proverbial tar-paper shack in northwestern Montana (between Kallispell and Libby) and ended up in journalism by ways and means that I’ve never understood. My parents met in Washington state where they were both reporters. He realized that the South was going to be the place to be for journalists of that era and sent clippings to the notorious Harry Ashmore.

I know a bit more about their (our) time in Arkansas than I did a few days ago because I found the University of Arkansas, Arkansas Gazette Project. Done for historical purposes, while most of the journalists of the civil-rights era were still alive, this is a collection of oral histories. There are around 130 interviews of most everyone who worked with my father at the Gazette, including a 78 page interview of him, done in 2001, a year before he died, which I didn’t know existed. Guess what I did all weekend.

He was incoherent here and there for much of the interview, but there are a few wonderful moments. He describes giving me my first bath. A neighbor arrived with food for the new family. On hearing he was a writer for the Gazette, she took the food back and left in a huff. He describes the bar where he spent a lot of time, which was integrated but with a line drawn down the middle. Buddy Portis, the guy who wrote True Grit and also a columnist at the Gazette, tells of practical jokes they played on one another.

Several of them ended up in New York. “The Arkansas Mafia”. My father was an editorial writer and columnist for Newsday. Portis worked for the New York Herald Tribune. Pat Crow, who I remember as Uncle Pat, was the fiction editor for the NewYorker. Many of the others I remember vaguely as characters in my father’s New York life to which I was only a occasional and peripheral observer. I don’t think I ever met Portis in New York. Though I’m told I peed on him in Arkansas.

All in all this is a wonderful find. However I feel my father and my mother were not treated as fairly or as well as they might of been. At the time of his interview my father had been suffering with the severe disabilities of a stroke for over fifteen years and that had taken a toll on his mind. Also many of the other interviews were led with what may have been a personal grudge.

The really interesting thing is that none of the work (his writing) is available on the internet. This is a regrettable aspect of the web, someone who authored a piece of software or whatever last year which will be insignificant in another year can have thousands of pages dedicated to them, but someone who wrote and influenced people for decades can have almost nothing available for public purview. This is merely a matter of when and a function of the internet’s unfortunate constant focus on the now.

I’m planning on pulling together some information about him and starting a wiki if the wiki people will let me. I think getting some of the work on the net will go a long way toward my own personal sense of what’s appropriate. I’ve contacted the various papers regarding access to his work and have set up a time to interview my mother. I don’t want to turn it into a big project.  I’d just like to get a few things up there on his behalf. I’m also now wildly curious about what it must have been like for us, as a family, in that Arkansas.

If you are out there in the ether-space, remember Patrick J. Owens, and have a few minutes, please jot down your memories or, better yet, grab a tape recorder and make a tape. Please contact me (barakadesignworks@msn.com) and I’ll send along an address.

There was one short and good glimpse of him at his best in his lengthy interview:

Interviewer:  So it sounds like it was pretty hard sometimes for the Gazette to be so aggressively pro-desegregation. Was it hard?
My Father: Well hard is not the right word. It took a lot of courage and certain amount of backbone and heart. That implied that there was some other way to be.

I guess I’m pretty proud of that.  That and having peed on the guy who wrote True Grit.